Last month, one of my colleagues racked up a $1,200 bill in a single two-hour coding session with an AI assistant. He wasn't doing anything unusual. Just debugging, pasting code blocks, asking follow-up questions.
He had no idea how much each interaction cost.
And that's the problem across our entire industry right now.
TL;DR: Tokens are AI's electricity meter. Code costs 1.5-2.5x more tokens than plain text. Uber blew its entire 2026 AI budget in 4 months. Copy-pasting code hurts you in conversation continuation, not initial cost. 9 specific habits can cut waste by 60%+. Tools with built-in context management (like Kiro) handle this automatically.
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